


Living on the Other Side of Dying

by orsaverba



Series: It's Not Redemption [4]
Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Happy Ending, M/M, Roadtrips, Self-Discovery, post-ffh, very light angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:46:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27993984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orsaverba/pseuds/orsaverba
Summary: Of the things that made up Peter Benjamin Parker, only four really mattered.
Relationships: Quentin Beck/Peter Parker
Series: It's Not Redemption [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1814803
Comments: 7
Kudos: 35





	Living on the Other Side of Dying

Losing absolutely everything takes a person to the very core of who they are. It's a violent crucible, the kind of trial either survived, or proven lethal. For a while, Peter thought he'd choke. Yet, stripped to his bones and white hot nerve endings, he found some kind of...  _ enlightenment _ .

Of the things that made up Peter Benjamin Parker, only four really mattered.

Creativity was still essential to his being. He wrote poetry in the form of circuitry and penned symphonies with shifting metal parts. To build, to fix, was in his  _ bones _ , and he didn't need a lab or a government budget to do it. 

In Texas he fixed motorcycles and children's toys, made improvements to factory machines that hadn't seen repairs in a hundred years. The people of the township called him "Inspector Gadget." He smelled like engine oil and iron for weeks.

Loyalty came second, in the list of things that made him. Blind faith, Quentin once called it; "A weakness of yours."

Was it? Could it really be considered a weakness when the flipside of loyalty was vengeance? 

He'd forgotten the cold anger that came with betrayal, but Tennessee helped him remember. He worked back to back shifts in a cramped and smoky kitchen, picking up extras while refusing Quentin's offer of different work, because he'd made a commitment. At the end of the week, the owner wouldn't pay him. Told Peter there was nothing he could do anyway, since he wasn't on the books.

"You're too trusting," Quentin had sighed into his curls while he seethed.

"Not forever," he'd promised.

The following week, Peter took every shift he could at the restaurant. He traded shifts with other employees and scheduled himself for almost seventy hours that week. Then, he and Quentin hopped a train to Nashville and changed phones.

( Quentin handed him an envelope once the train began to pull out of the station. It was full of cash; exactly what his earnings should have been. He didn't ask where it came from, or why it smelled of cooking oil. )

They stopped in Philly. Peter traded beat up sneakers for Timberland boots and kept a ball cap low over his eyes. He found work in a little bodega owned by a Chinese family and Quentin did something of suspicious legality. 

Three days into working, someone robbed the store. They shot the old man behind the counter in the shoulder, just because.

It turned out that Mr. Stark had been right after all; it really  _ wasn't _ about the suit. Right and wrong, a drive to  _ protect _ the innocent, was as much a part of Peter as anything else. 

He got the money back. The old man's wife didn't ask questions, just cleaned the blood out of his hoodie in their tiny kitchen sink. They tried to give him extra money, but he refused. Instead, Peter left each night with a tupperware laden with home cooking. 

Peter bought a ski mask and leather gloves. When Quentin found the radio tuned to a police scanner, Peter said;

"It's who I am."

They didn't keep the radio. Quentin built a program to track serial crimes the authorities overlooked instead. He called it W.E.B.

And beneath all of it, when the lot of him was torn away and there was just Peter, alone, he found something else. 

_ A will to survive _ . 

Not to live one more day, but to claw tooth and nail for his own existence. It was a purely primal, selfish urge, unlike anything Peter had felt before. It was freeing. Not just his own selfishness, but the permission to be so hellbent on  _ himself _ . 

And Quentin encouraged it. He grinned with wolf's teeth and told Peter to leave him for dead if he had to.

He'd thought, once, that he knew himself. But that identity had been carved away and left to rot. Underneath it, he found not the boy he remembered from  _ before _ , but a man.

News outlets stopped replaying the falsified footage of Mysterio's demise. Peter Parker's face drifted to a corner blurb on page twelve rather than taking up the entire front page. The world moved on. And so did he.

"Let's get a van. We can kit it out like a tiny house inside."

"Hipster shit," Quentin snorted. "What's wrong with our girl, huh?"

"I want to sleep in a  _ bed _ , babe. What about an RV?"

"Too big. Trailer's a pain in the ass too."

Peter thumbed through pinterest. 

"How about a truck?" he asked. "With a camper."

He showed Quentin his phone. 

"Huh. Yeah, alright. Gonna have to save up for a decent truck, though."

"Green fuel."

"Hippie," Quentin scoffed. But he smiled.

Eventually, the world would forget. Not  _ Spiderman  _ and  _ Mysterio _ , but Quentin Beck and Peter Parker. They'd drift into obscurity and be freer than they were, even now. If done carefully, they could return to their old lives.

Would he? Go back, if he could?

Nostalgia made those days so rosy, but the present tense was crimson and gold. Peter had a hand in the long waves of Quentin's russet hair and the other on the steering wheel of their new truck. The road was open and his knuckles were sore from the last bank robbing chucklefuck he'd donated to the local authorities. 

"I still think we should put W.E.B. deeper on the darknet," Quentin said, fingers flying over his laptop keyboard. "Hell, I think setting up a fucking crowdfunded vigilante hitlist is- while admirably diabolical -relatively  _ insa _ \-- Why are you grinning at me like that?"

Peter's grin only widened at the suspicious stare.

"Just happy," he hummed, admiring how the setting sun played off Quentin's skin from the corner of his eye. 

Quentin's expression went soft.

"Yeah?" he said, reaching for the hand in his hair. He pulled it round to kiss the inside of Peter's wrist. "Good. Like it when you're happy, pretty thing."

"I'm happy with you."

Quentin's head jerked up. He stared at him, wide eyed.

Peter laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> Something of a conclusion to this AU, which I've been waiting to type up for quite a while.
> 
> You can always find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/orsaverba) and [Tumblr](https://orsa-verba.tumblr.com), so feel free to come chat any time. <3


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